12/17/2022

I was thinking of doing another audio journal this month, but I think there are a lot of things I can talk about myself this month so it might be better if I write it all out. Honestly, the week so far has been like a blur because there has been so much going on.

I’ll start with the first day of the week, Monday 12/12. It was an A day meaning I started with History, then Physics, then Co, then Spanish, and finally Economics. Honestly, the day went pretty smoothly despite my physics test in the morning. After school, I went to robotics club and we continued researching the computer vision system that we were trying to develop for the team and the simulation code that we were supposed to use to test our code without using the robot. The basic idea of the computer vision system is to use the raspberry pi along with two usb cameras to read a camera feed and find the location of certain kinds of balls. We were planning to use a python library called opencv to perform operations on this image to find the location of circles in the image that we can send to the robot to do some actions with – like capture a ball. Tracking circles is harder than it seems, even though there are already functions that We needed to learn about the simulation program because without simulation it would be hard to test our robot code. Since building the robot takes a lot of time, usually, the programming subteam gets the robot last – meaning that there is not much time to test. So, it would be really helpful if we could test the robot without actually using the robot. On Monday, we didn’t get too far into our research but we still made progress toward the goal.

12/22/23

I didn’t have enough time to finish my journal entry last Saturday, but I can summarize that week by saying that it was pretty normal. I went to the December CJML after school on 12/14 and then I went to robotics again on Thursday the 15th. At the CJML, AIT didn’t do particularly well despite my own good performance for the team. We lost to Magnet by 2 points and it was a CJML to forget for us. The robotics meeting was better because we got a lot of the tracking things working during the meeting. On Friday, I also got my SAT score. Thankfully, I don’t have to take it again!

This week so far has been full of tests and quizzes as teachers all try to test us on their units before we “forget” everything. A notable example of this is my Spanish class where our teacher decided to schedule 4 assessments in a row in the 4 classes leading up to winter break. Now, since it is all over, I can say that it wasn’t as bad a week as I expected it to be. For most of my classes, like physics, math, and economics, I got away with studying an hour the day before, but for my hardest class, Spanish, I spent the entire week studying for the many exams coming my way. Out of the two assessments I took this week, I know that despite my preparation I got a score that will definitely drop my grade down by 7 points which means my marking period average won’t be looking too good in the future. Honestly, I don’t know what happened between me and Spanish. The last few years have been pretty easy in Spanish for me because we were mainly graded on grammar, vocabulary, and some comprehension which was a breeze for me since I could easily remember those things before the exam. Even though I memorized right before a test or a quiz, some of the grammar or vocabulary usually stuck with me and improved my Spanish. Comprehension in Spanish is something I’ve struggled with since the beginning. Now I realize that in most of my previous Spanish tests I have mainly gotten comprehension questions wrong. I didn’t notice this weakness before because my good grades hid my need for improvement. This year, I have tried a lot more to improve my comprehension skills, but that is something that comes with practice and I don’t think it is something that I’ll be able to improve fast enough in for this class. I’ll definitely still try as best I can though.

Currently, I am pretty excited for winter break and also AIT day. I think everybody needs a break right now so that we can be better prepared for next year and midterms. My family is planning to go to Florida right after school tomorrow. Hopefully, it will be a relaxing holiday break.

1/4/23

I had a great winter break! Florida and South Carolina were much better than New Jersey weather-wise during winter break. My family and I love the beach so we spent a lot of time there and on the boardwalks. Winter break was necessary to relieve all the stress that I had about school (particularly my Spanish grade which I wish I wasn’t joking is my hardest class so far in high school) I didn’t do a single school assignment until the day before we came back to school.

Speaking of school, midterms are coming up. I just checked the schedule and I’m really thankful for whoever decided to spread the exams over the weekend. Taking 4 exams back to back in the same week is hard (which is what I did last year) I’m glad someone understands that we need to have breaks between exams so that students aren’t burnt out in midnight study sessions. Instead of studying the night before for exams, this will make the studying workload way lighter. There is a possibility that it isn’t the reason why midterms are scheduled like this but it is nice to know that the administration understands the troubles of the students.

Robotics competition season starts this Saturday and I’m pretty excited about it. The team is planning a nice event when the game will be unveiled in the Magnet auditorium.

Math league is also having a math madness against Magnet on Friday which is also pretty exciting. AIT and Magnet have a rivalry in most math competitions because we are both pretty evenly matched.

1/7/23

AIT beat Magnet with a score of 29 to 26. Woohoo!!! It was a close match, but AIT won in the end. This definitively proves that the AIT math league is better than the Magnet math league for sure. I got a score of 7 out of 8 (making me tied for first at AIT) and I nearly missed the math madness because I was handing in my permission slip for FBLA. I got back to Dr. Wiener’s room with only 20 seconds to get into the competition. If I didn’t get there in time AIT might not have won the match. Actually, after thinking about it for a minute, AIT still would have won. The score is the sum of the top 5 players on each team. For AIT the next highest player had a score of 4 so we would have lost 3 points. This means that we would be tied with Magnet 26 to 26. If there is a tie, the speed of both teams comes into consideration, and the team with the lowest average time to complete all the problems wins. AIT’s average time was 28:30 and Magnet’s was 28:55, a difference of only 25 seconds! Since I started late, I finished right at the end and used all 30 minutes so the average would go higher without me. Regardless, AIT still would have beat Magnet, but it is a good thing I was there so AIT could beat them fair and square and not by 25 seconds.

The rest of the day was normal. I learned about $\int F(x) dr$ (FDR), the line integral of a vector field F over line r, in math class which was pretty interesting. When I got home, I began looking at object detection stuff for robotics. I learned about YOLO detection (You only look once) and tried to get it to work with my stuff. I couldn’t get it to calculate fast enough for my application but I still learned some things.

The next day, today, I attended the robotics kickoff event. It went really well I think. It’s a pretty easy game and I think we can have a complete robot when it comes time to compete. I’ll talk more about robotics in my next journal. Here’s an idea: what if I make an audio journal about what’s going on at robotics.